In the near future, IBM aims to stop hiring for positions that can be automated, the company’s CEO told the publication.
According to Arvind Krishna, CEO of the US tech giant IBM, the company anticipates eliminating approximately 8,000 jobs and replacing them with AI in the upcoming years.
In an interview released on Tuesday, Krishna stated that the firm intends to curtail or stop hiring for back-office jobs like human resources, adding that these non-customer-facing positions now employ close to 26,000 people.
“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna added, speculating that employment losses brought on by AI may affect some 7,800 individuals.
The news agency was also informed by an IBM spokesman that no one currently working in these positions will be fired by the firm, although they did add that any positions lost to attrition will no longer be replaced.
Another IBM official confirmed this in an email to Business Insider, saying that there is “no blanket hiring ‘pause’ in place” and that the company is “being deliberate and thoughtful in our hiring with a focus on revenue-generating roles.” The business is “very selective when filling jobs that don’t directly touch our clients or technology,” the official continued, emphasizing that IBM is still actively hiring for thousands of positions.
Recent developments in generative AI, including the well-liked ChatGPT, have the potential to cause a “significant disruption” in the labor market, according to a paper released by the Goldman Sachs Economics Research team in late March.
The researchers hypothesized that as many as 300 million workers worldwide might be replaced by AI and that two-thirds of employment in the US and Europe are vulnerable to “some degree of AI automation.” Additionally, they mentioned that a quarter of present-day jobs could be replaced by generative AI.
The ability of generative AI to produce content that is indistinguishable from human-created output and to dissolve communication barriers between humans and machines “reflects a major advancement with potentially large macroeconomic effects,” Goldman Sachs stated.
More than 1,100 AI researchers, tech titans, and other futurists earlier this year, including Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on “giant AI experiments.”
If artificial intelligence (AI) systems with “human-competitive intelligence” ever succeed in eluding the comprehension and control of their designers, the signatories cautioned, they might pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”
